Articles

Essays and peer-reviewed scholarship in Yiddish Studies, an interdisciplinary field that engages all aspects of Yiddish cultural production, especially in its relationship to other cultures and languages.

Click here for a separate listing of open-access, peer-reviewed articles.

Article

On Editing the Old Yiddish Arthurian Romance Viduvilt

A report on the process of cre­at­ing a schol­ar­ly edi­tion of the Old Yid­dish Arthuri­an romance Viduvilt.

Review

Review of From a Distant Relation by Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky, edited and translated by James Adam Redfield

Berdichevsky’s Yid­dish writ­ing focused on the world he had left behind, and frankly strug­gled with his ambiva­lence about these communities.

Review

Review of From the Jewish Provinces by Fradl Shtok, translated by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter

From the Jew­ish Provinces is a valu­able and high­ly read­able addi­tion to Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture in translation.

Review

Review of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs

Jacobs (who, in addi­tion to being a schol­ar of mod­ern Hebrew lit­er­a­ture, is also an accom­plished trans­la­tor and poet) offers a rethink­ing of the mod­ern Hebrew canon as fun­da­men­tal­ly shaped by what she calls a trans­la­tion­al poetics.”

Review

Review of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody by Saul Noam Zaritt

Replete with insight­ful close read­ings of key his­tor­i­cal and lit­er­ary texts, Jew­ish Amer­i­can Writ­ing and World Lit­er­a­ture com­pli­cates the lim­it­ing bina­ry of the national/​transnational models.

Article

Translating As Saying

Can Mar­tin Buber and Franz Rosen­zweig’s trans­la­tion of the Hebrew Bible be con­sid­ered a form of Jew­ish speech? When and how does trans­la­tion become a Jew­ish way of talking?

Review

A Double Dose of Early Twentieth-Century Yiddish Talush-hood: Two New Translations by Daniel Kennedy

In new trans­la­tions by Daniel Kennedy, Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s War­saw Sto­ries (White Goat Press) and Zal­man Shneour’s A Death: Notes of a Sui­cide (Wake­field Press) can right­ful­ly be labeled clas­sic”; they reach across time and space to name an eter­nal — and unro­man­tic — facet of human experience.

Article

Introduction: Translation - Poetics, Negotiation, Tradaptation; A Special Issue of In geveb on Translation

The con­tri­bu­tions of this spe­cial issue show­case the per­for­ma­tive dimen­sion of trans­la­tion: Musi­cians and poets (when read­ing their texts) draw atten­tion to the inter­ac­tions between lan­guages, pho­net­ic expe­ri­ences, rhythm, rhyme, and the pro­duc­tive use of mis­un­der­stand­ings. Crit­i­cal reflec­tions on their own trans­la­tions, and the role per­formed by agents such as edi­tors (e.g. of selec­tion and design), engen­der the ques­tion of what it meant his­tor­i­cal­ly and what it means today to be a writer or read­er in mul­ti­lin­gual settings.

Article

Literarishe reveransn”: Yiddish Translation as Negotiation

Radosav dis­cuss­es her expe­ri­ences as a trans­la­tor of Yid­dish poet­ry into Roman­ian and her eval­u­a­tion of cer­tain trans­la­tions from oth­er lan­guages into Roman­ian or from Roman­ian into Yid­dish. The essay out­lines a strat­e­gy of trans­la­tion-recre­ation,” in which the trans­la­tor bal­ances a sense of fideli­ty to the source text with the attempt to cre­ative­ly repro­duce its inter­nal mechanism.

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